I’m here at The Informationist: Collaboration between scientists and librarians to support informatics research at the Embassy Suites in DC. It’s sponsored by Elsevier as part of their Research Connect series.

(these are stream of consciousness)

Tonna – VP North Am, Academic & Gov’t. Research productivity metrics more important for funding decisions. Data for institute and gov’t research funding decisions. Their goals: increase productivity (doing science & getting grants), provide data for making funding decisions. Increased use of ejournals correlates with increased publication and funding ( but i point out that correlation is not causality). They’re going from 10 years ago publishing print to e to platform/services. Trends: openness, interoperability/integration/customization, personalization, commoditization of content, cloud, data intensive science.

Elsevier is opening up their API to developers to facilitate app development. Like the integration of NextBio, can integrate other services including local, proprietary info. Developers will have access to the data so that they can integrate the information in. 2 iphone apps coming this year: 1st scopus, then science direct. Improving their Scopus data, also adding in more analysis tools like SciVal.

Dr Ellen Detlefsen – The Librarianship-Informatics Challenge: Where are we headed? (from SIS at Pitt)

informatics, under information science, but the different x that can substitute for x informatics has exploded. AHIMA (Am Health Information Management Association) has a different definition for informatics. In Canada and Europe – “health informatics” broader term for medical and biomedical informatics.

Shortliffe matrix

bioinformatics – molecular and cellular processes

imaging -tissues and organs

clinical – individuals (patients)

public health – population and society

but where does consumer go?

bioinformatics – combines bio, cs, and it as a single effort. MeSH has computational biology to describe this idea.

But there are many areas of “informatics” that aren’t medical. LCSH has lots of different informatics (what, she hasn’t heard of cheminformatics???). Also social informatics, museum informatics, biodiversity… (she’s acting like we haven’t heard of all of this stuff or aren’t familiar with it -geez)

informationists – support informatics work. sometimes a separate group of people then clinical medical librarians.

medical informationists – trained in use of medical information resources, familiar with information needs and uses of other team members, know software and it both for info resources, patient records, literature based discovery, etc. many have advanced degrees and work experience in subject matter

informationist != librarian (although she has seen job descriptions that just slap the name on)